Realpolitik. – The honeymoon of German philosophy had arrived; all the young theologians of the T ¨ ubingen seminary ran off into the bushes – they were all looking for “faculties.” And what didn’t they find – in that innocent, abundant, still youthful age of the German spirit, when Romanticism, that malicious fairy, whispered, whistled, and sang, when people did not know how to tell the difference between “dis- covering” and “inventing”! Above all, a faculty of the “supersensible”: Schelling christened it intellectual intuition, and thus gratified the heart’s desire of his basically piety-craving Germans. We can do no grea ter in- justice to this whole high-spirited and enthusiastic movement (which was just youthfulness, however boldly it might have clothed itself in gray and hoary concepts) than to take it seriously or especially to treat it with moral indignation. Enough, we grew up, – the dream faded away. There came a time when people scratched their heads: some still scra tch them to- day. There had been dreamers: first and foremost – the old Kant. “By virtue of a f aculty” – he had said, or at least meant. But is that really – an answer? An explanation? Or instead just a re petition of the questio n? So how does opium cause sleep? “By virtue of a faculty,” namely the virtus dormitiva – replies the doctor in Moli ` ere, quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, cujus est natura sensus assoupire. But answers like this belong in comedy, and the time has finally come to replace the Kantian question “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” with another question, “Why is the belief in such judgments necessary?” – to realize, in other words, that such judgments must be believed true for the purpose of preserving beings of our type; which is why these judgments could of course still be false! Or, to be blunt, basic and clearer still: synthetic judgments a priori do not have “to be possible” at all: we have no right to them, and in our mouths they are nothing but f alse judgments. It is only the belief in their truth that is necessary as a foreground belief and piece of visual evidence, belonging to the perspectival optics of life.